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I have a Dell PowerEdge R720XD with 2x Xeon E5-2640 v2 (16 cores total), 16 GB of RAM, and 2x 3 TB hard drives. I have Windows 10 running on the machine.

When I connect a video card to the system, the fans are significantly louder than if the system does not have a video card. It doesn't matter which riser board the video card is plugged into. It does not require PCI-e power, as it is a low-end card, a Radeon R7 250.

Is there a way to ramp the fans down to around idle so that it's not as loud? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Rowan McJimsey
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    That may very well be by design - that's a server and a server is designed to run at high load for extended time. Also, the original GPUs may even be passively cooled. Windows 10 is not a supported OS and seems to indicate off-topic home use, see the [help/on-topic]. – Zac67 Jan 03 '23 at 07:55
  • @Rowan McJimsey - if you're just getting into servers feel free to comment here and as I have time I don't mind shooting you a response. Happy to see an enthusiast getting into things – Grant Curell Jan 03 '23 at 16:49
  • Thanks so much! I am just super inexperienced in servers. I know a lot about macOS and Windows, but I figured I might just try to get Windows 10 running on the PowerEdge, because it's a spare machine, and, why not? But if it's not possible without problems, then maybe it's not worth it—I don't know. – Rowan McJimsey Jan 04 '23 at 18:58

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(Legally required notice - I work for Dell)

This is expected behavior. If you put a new PCIe card in the system that:

  1. Does not have supported Dell firmware so it doesn’t know how to provide thermal feedback to idrac
  2. Produces heat
  3. Reduces airflow through the chassis

then the desired behavior is higher fan speeds so the box does not cook.

That aside - that box is also ancient and running an unsupported operating system so expect erratic behavior.

Going out on a limb… is someone running an eBay server at home and discovering it’s rather loud (because I also made that mistake once upon a time)

Grant Curell
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